Pipeline Cleanup: 1,912 Stale Deals Closed Out and a Forecast the Owner Finally Trusts

Challenge

A small manufacturer had been in HubSpot for four years. Every rep had created their own pipeline, so six pipelines described one sales process. 2,300 deals were open, but the owner knew fewer than 400 were real. The weekly forecast report was ignored because nobody believed it.

That is the kind of portal where turning on a Prospecting Agent would be dangerous: it would happily email contacts sitting on "open" deals from 2022.

Approach

• Mapped the real process in two workshops: quote, site survey, proposal, install, service contract.
• Collapsed six pipelines into three (new equipment, service contracts, parts) with exit criteria written on every stage.
• Bulk-closed 1,912 deals with no activity in 180 days as closed-lost with a reason, so history was kept but the forecast was not.
• Added required properties at stage changes (next step, close date, decision-maker) and a weekly workflow that flags deals idle for 14 days to the owner.
• Built a forecast dashboard by pipeline and rep that leadership reviews every Monday.

Results

• 1,912 stale deals closed out and tagged; the forecast is down to the deals that are actually moving.
• 94% of open deals carry a dated next step, up from 23%.
• The Monday forecast meeting runs off the dashboard instead of a spreadsheet.

AI-readiness impact

Readiness moved from 31 to 78. Data foundation and governance were the big movers: deal–contact associations, lifecycle discipline and documented workflows. A Prospecting Agent pilot on dormant leads, excluding anyone on an open deal, is now the next step rather than a risk.